By Claire Yubin Oh
Publication Date: 2025-12-08 11:03:00
Confluent is going vertical in premarket trading on Monday, up 28% at the time of writing, after the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is close to finalizing a deal to acquire the data-infrastructure company for ~$11 billion.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the report added that the deal could be announced as soon as today, though nothing has been finalized yet. If the rumored price is the equity value of any deal, then IBM’s acquisition of the real-time data-processing open source platform, which is often used for big AI models, would represent a ~35% premium to Confluent’s Friday close, which pegged the company at a $8.14 billion market cap.
IBM remains relatively flat on the news, though the reported deal would be the biggest deal for the tech giant in recent years, as the company works to increase spending on cloud and AI-related services after growth slowed down in its core cloud software business last quarter.
